2024 11 23T1750

Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint:

I had tried various obvious ways of learning how to paint, such as special painting lessons at school, evening classes in life drawing, sketching during holidays and visiting Art Galleries in the lunch hour and on Saturdays. But both the life drawings and the sketches were vaguely disappointing, they gave no sense of being new creations in their own right, they seemed to be only tolerably good imitations of something else; in fact, to be counterfeit.

This sense of one's work being counterfeit can be felt in many endeavors, not only painting. I think of it especially in regard to work--in my case, engineering and management. Many of us write code in accordance with "rules" or "best practices", and it's easy to feel that this work is "counterfeit" in that it is a more or less rote following of instructions, not a genuine response to the needs of the situation. Likewise with management, especially when it comes to behaving "like a manager" or "like a leader".

Tags: [[psychology]] [[leadership]]